Friday, July 11, 2008

New Talent Trees: I am SO Excited

So, Wowhead put up the new talent trees (as I'm sure everyone is aware of by now), and I've been playing with them. I've had very little internet time as of late, which is why I feel a bit tardy to the party, but I have to say:

Wow.

A lot of this stuff is crazy. I can see Moonkins becoming actual vital parts of raids instead of the liability lots of raiding guilds see them as. Still no talented threat dump, but perhaps a trainable one will appear. Otherwise, I can see it still being difficult to get them into raids without gimping their dps at times to keep from pulling aggro. There's also a sort of odd jump for them in the Restoration tree if they want "Master Shapeshifter" - They'll need to take a few points in either a distinctly feral or distinctly resto talent to get there, which isn't optimal at all. I can plainly see a few "PvP" talents, such as "Owlkin Frenzy" which works off the player taking damage.

Ferals are getting scary. Looking at what they can do, I can't imagine there will be too much Arena QQ. The ability to remove all loss of control effects on your character and be immune to them for the duration of "Berserk"? Adding an infected wound, being able to hit up to three targets with Maul and Mangle, being refunded energy for a miss on a finishing move...just intense, imo.

The Restoration tree does not disappoint either. Especially with one certain thing I noticed...

There is no longer any movement impairment effect in the Tree of Life tooltip.

HUZZAH!

There's a little blip in the talent progression: If you take Imp MotW and Nature's Focus, then Subtlety and Natural Shapehifter, followed by Intensity and Master Shapeshifter, and then take Improved Rejuvenation, you are left needing one talent point in something to progress further down the talent tree. Since ToL still doesn't have Healing Touch available to it, there's a question as to where you put this free-floating point.

The first thing I thought of when I saw the talent "Replenish" was the Reliquary of Souls fight, with the Essence of Anger. The tank in that fight has to dump their mana/rage as fast as possible, as Anger does an attack which burns it from them and gives them a high amount of damage. If there are any fights where this occurs, having the "Replenish" talent could actually be a detriment. Though, of course, I'm sure these situations would probably be few in number.

Overall, I'm excited to try each and every one of these trees when WotLK comes out, and I can't wait until I'm healing with a Flourish.

7 comments:

The thing I noticed was that Berserk has no stated duration or cooldown. If it's just the immunity to fear, etc that's getting to you, keep in mind that warriors are immune to warlocks a third of the time anyway, and with Death Wish (which any good arms warrior will have) and a PvP trinket, it's just plain annoying trying to fear a warrior away from, say, the guy capping BS or the healer trying to recover from a case of critical MS/whirlwind rotation to the face. (I've had four crits on my simple rotation of white --> MS --> white --> WW a lot lately. The enemy healers were not happy.) Perhaps Blizzard's trying to give that sort of fear immunity to ferals as well?

Tree of Life (Restoration): You can now cast all Restoration spells (Healing Touch) in the form, but Tree of Life now only reduces the mana cost of your healing over time spells (Rejuvenation, Lifebloom, Regrowth and Flourish) by 20%.

So all those Healing Touch talents are once again right up there on the agenda.

Search

The Authors

Bellwether is a level 80 Druid on Dark Iron (PvP - US). She has experience in endgame raids, PvP and arena as a Restoration spec'd Healer. She also has knowledge on many other aspects of the druid class, including the other talent trees. Her alts include a Ret Paladin named Bellbell with a bitchin' attitude, and many ickle alties.Contact Information:E-mail: 4haelz AT gmail DOT comAIM: JuiceboxDaniMSN: bellwetherdani@live.comSubscribe to 4 Haelz!Picture provided by the lovely Phaelia of Resto4Life.

Sannhet is a Level 80 Ret Paladin, Frost DK and perhaps soon Warrior with an attitude and an occasional bone to pick. He loves to debate and hopefully he'll write in here to tell you how awesome he is (he's very awesome). He's been referred to on this blog before as "Button."